There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth about the new income numbers that the Census Bureau has compiled. (Probably in the off-hours when it wasn't planning to kidnap Michele Bachmann's children and force them into the Obama Youth Zombie Army.) It certainly harshes the mellow provided by those (slowly) improving employment figures that came out today.

I heard a woman on the radio today who runs a Santa Claus agency. She says that, by far, the most common requests made by children to her various temporary Kringles this year are for socks, for shoes, and for food. The unemployment numbers, as dreadful as they are, are not as solemn and deadly as the Census figures should be to all of us. They are more the measure of a permanent condition — meals missed, kids asleep in class, cold feet in the winter, domestic abuse, alcoholism, hopelessness — than they are of something as transient as whether or not you can get a job for a few weeks stocking shelves for the holiday rush. They are a way to measure a deeper and more permanent state of despair. They are a way to measure the abiding failure of political democracy.

And this man...

Robert Rector, a senior research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation, questioned whether some people classified as poor or low-income actually suffer material hardship. He said that while safety-net programs have helped many Americans, they have gone too far, citing poor people who live in decent-size homes, drive cars and own wide-screen TVs.... There's no doubt the recession has thrown a lot of people out of work and incomes have fallen. As we come out of recession, it will be important that these programs promote self-sufficiency rather than dependence and encourage people to look for work."

...is an indecent monster who should be shunned by respectable society. He wouldn't last 15 minutes living the life he so glibly dismisses.